Third seminar of this year’s CGYPP Program took place in Berlin

The ninth year of the annual Czech-German Young Professionals Program (CGYPP) that successfully started in Prague, concluded last week with its third seminar in Berlin.

Fourteen participants from Germany and the Czech Republic were invited to participate in the annual series of workshops and discuss relevant economic, political, and social issues. This year’s topic was Chances and Challenges of Digitalization. The Berlin seminar focused specifically on the topic of Digital Democracy.

The program of the third session was opened by a Redesign Digital Democracy workshop. The program continued with a Public Fishbowl discussion organized in cooperation with the Czech Centre Berlin. The discussion was facilitated by Tomáš Sacher, director of the Czech Centre and Anneke Hudalla, seminar director from the European Academy in Berlin. The round focused on the Impact of digitalization on European democracy as we know it. The invited speakers were Curd Knüpfer, director of the Research project “Digitalization and the Transnational Public Sphere” at Weizenbaum-Institute, Bianca Praetorius from the German party Democracy in Motion and Daniel Prokop, sociologist from the Czech research agency MEDIAN.

The second day started with a discussion round with journalist and Internet activist Julia Krüger about the power of algorithms and big data in the public sphere. Afterwards the participants had a unique opportunity to visit the Berlin Wall Memorial and take part in the Virtual reality Tour. On Saturday evening the program continued with a second part of the workshop Redesign Digital Democracy.

Sunday started with a warm-up session lead by Johanna Sokoliess. It was followed by a round table named New digital opportunities for (cross-border) political participation? with Martin Speer and Moritz Ritter. The third day concluded with the closing part of the workshop Redesign Digital Democracy and a teambuilding activity.

Last day was opened by a discussion with the title European democracy put to the test, or: how to deal with fake news & hate speech. The presenting speakers were Daniel Holznagel from German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection and journalist Karolin Schwarz. The whole seminar was concluded by a discussion about the role of artificial intelligence and big data in politics leady by professor Gary Schaal from the Helmut Schmidt University.

At the moment, you can find the published podcasts of our participants on our Facebook page.